Yesterday Loki’s family motored energetically some fifty miles and back to a garden party near London.
A wonderful house with wonderful lawns and gardens—one feels that the hideous tide of brick and mortar must inevitably sweep over and destroy it before another generation comes and goes, so that there is a kind of pathos in its very beauty.
Out of the unlovely mean streets along which the tram-line runs its abominable way, one turns off into the cool country road. The long avenue is bordered by wide fields where, as we passed yesterday, the new-mown grass was lying in silver furrows. The country is quite flat; but the richness of the green, the incidents of lake and timber, give it a placid English fairness of its own.
The Lady of Villino Loki went with a keen eye to garden hints, and her first thrill was a Honeysuckle screen in the little garden of the second lodge. Such a Honeysuckle screen! It had once, she supposes, been an arch, for it rose to a kind of gable peak in the centre, but it was filled in either by design or natural luxuriance till it was a complete mass of bloom, a solid wall of blossom. Never had she beheld such a thing before. She wants Honeysuckle at the Villino, as she said already, and she is fired with fresh enthusiasm. Why should she not have a hedge of Honeysuckle, not too far from the house itself? It is settled. She will buy fifty in November and try.
The weather, which had been misty, thundery and unpromising, cleared just upon our arrival at the great “Adam” house. The lawns were in their perfection, the shade of the Cedars was cut out on the sun-golden turf, the massed flowers were vivid against their cunningly devised backgrounds. Naturally Villino Loki, even in its wildest dreams, cannot emulate this great and carefully cherished place; but one can find practical suggestions here and there. We cannot mass rare and golden-hued Maples over a broad band of yellow Calceolarias anywhere on our terraced lawns; but it is very instructive to see the management of certain herbaceous borders, where three or four large pillars of Rambler Roses alternate with mauve and silver-leaved Japanese Maples at the back; the foreground being of the usual herbaceous order.
We had no idea that the dwarf bright yellow Evening Primroses would look so well grouped together. And Nemesia, “Heavenly Blue,” has become the one annual our souls long for: blue flowers are all too rare.
Everything was most kindly labelled. We do not know if it is possible to obtain any seedlings this time of year; but certainly, next year, this adorable little plant, Nemesia, with its most exquisite turquoise blue colourings and its splendid efflorescence, shall enter largely into our schemes. In between the Nemesia, bushes of Campanula Persicifolia rose with cool restrained tones; the contrast was one to be copied also.
Another not impossible example was a Rose screen, starting with a background of close growing Ramblers, some ten or twelve feet high, supplemented midway by some of the larger Bush Roses and running down to the edge of the turf in front with pegged-down Teas; so that, to the very top, it was one mass of varied bloom. We do not see any reason why such an effect should not be copied, even in a small garden.
The standard Scarlet Geraniums we must admire from a respectful distance. They are as much beyond our humble resources as the standard Heliotrope we so much admired a year ago in a millionaire’s huge grounds not very far from us. These last rose out of a bed of mauve Violas. The ambitious soul of the mistress of the Villino hungered to copy it; but she knew that hunger would never be assuaged.